eCALL ­- FOR A SAFER JOURNEY

Technology is evolving at a very fast pace. The technologies that we see in our fantasy worlds are now being transformed into reality. We have often seen in movies, the cops getting notified about the mishaps on road through electrical signals and locating them through GPS technology. Soon this would be a reality.

eCALL ­- FOR A SAFER JOURNEY

eCall: It is a swift aid initiative undertaken by Europe to help motorists involved in accidents anywhere in the concerned Union. The underlying principle revolves around setting up a device in every vehicle that will automatically get active in case of an accident.

It will automatically inform the authorities about the mishap by either a call or a message; wirelessly sending airbag deployment and impact sensor information as well as the GPS coordinates to local emergency authorities.

eCall would be built on E112 (emergency telephone number for Europe). The commission cogitates to develop a fully functional eCall service by 2015. Surveys and estimates suggest that this service can increase the emergency response times by 40% in urban areas and by 50% in rural areas.

Communication protocols and language issues however, pose some problems in building of this kind of technology. The Testing phase has been implemented by testing with the GPRS and the in-band signalling over cellular networks.

However, there are privacy concerns revolving around this technology. It might also be possible that the system might become active even when no actual crash or collision has taken place. There is also uncertainty over how to classify a major and a minor accident. In case, the call reports a wrong accident, time and effort would be wasted.

However, if we are able to build this system successfully, providing solutions to all the problems, we would be able to speed up the emergency response time, saving life and property.